CBC

OTTAWA – An attempt by the Conservatives to summon CBC executives over the network’s refusal to describe Hamas as terrorists was blocked Tuesday by the Liberals, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP.

Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman put forward a motion to the parliamentary committee on public accounts asking it to denounce the position of the public broadcaster, and to call various CBC executives to appear in front of the committee for a minimum of two hours each. She had wanted to call CBC president and CEO Catherine Tait, English-services ombudsman Jack Nagler and director of journalistic standards, George Achi.

The CBC should be defunded.

It’s a waste of money to pay $1.2 billion per year to this media organization and now the government is set to hand it even more.

This past weekend, I was a guest on the CBC’s weekly call-in show, Cross Country Checkup, to discuss and debate the question: do we still need the CBC?

I was there in particular to make the case that the news media market has evolved over the past decades such that a public broadcaster of the size and scope of the CBC is no longer justified. Others argued in favour of preserving the CBC. And then there was a combination of callers and experts who found themselves somewhere in the middle.

An idea whose time has come.

CBC is claiming state secrets when asked about the cost of a Supreme Court battle over getting information on government secrets. Canada’s state broadcaster has been pushing Ontario Premier Doug Ford to release the mandate letters given to his cabinet ministers since 2018.

After the head of Canada’s public broadcaster gave a newspaper interview earlier this year that promised CBC would eventually become a digital-only product and that criticized Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, senior managers were quick to refute her comments, internal emails suggest.

The Globe and Mail reported in February based on an interview with Catherine Tait that she was preparing to end traditional TV and radio broadcasts and move completely to a digital platform, but that this likely wouldn’t happen in the next decade.

Bottom line, CBC staff are worried about job loss under the proposed digital platform.

Everything else is just smoke to hide the CBC’s hard left cultural bias in the hope of currying public sympathy.

Regardless of where the dust settles on Canada’s tumultuous battle with Big Tech, the nation’s news industry won’t find stability until its playing field is levelled.

That means ending the CBC’s ability to sell advertising in all of its forms and turning it into a pure play public broadcaster and online news organization.

When the Reform party shook up Canadian politics in the 1990s, one of its proposals was to privatize CBC Television. In the three- or four-channel TV universe of the ’50s, it may have made sense to have a tax-funded corporation providing a full range of programming, from news to sports to comedy to variety. But even in the early ’90s, as today’s infinite-channel universe was beginning to take shape, there was no shortage of viewing options for Canadians and more than enough niches for original Canadian programming to fill without taxpayer assistance.